The Evernote evolution continues with Evernote Business and Moleskine ‘Smart Notebook’

The productivity platform continues to assert itself with a new niche, Corporate-focused application and a smart notebook from Moleskine.

Today, Evernote kicked off its second annual developer Trunk Conference, complete with a little numbers showing off and some big announcements for the productivity platform. Before diving into the new launches, here’s a quick look at Evernote’s growth:

• Evernote now has 40 million users
• 15,000 developers are using the Evernote API
• 8 in-house Evernote-made apps

For quite awhile now, it’s been clear that Evernote is more than just an app. What began as a mobile answer to the legal yellow pad has evolved into a rich, note-taking, memory-making ecosystem that is multi-device and function focused. That’s in part largely thanks to its devotion to developers, who have created a rich variety of apps to keep Evernote current, useful, and competitive. Evernote users don’t have to settle for stagnancy. Some recent fundraising hasn’t gone unnoticed either, which CEO Phil Libin explained to me earlier this year as a sweet spot where the company “can take the most risks, experience, and do what we love.”

Evernote Business

And today we’re getting to see some of the fruits of their labor and the effects of this fundraising. First new development: Evernote Business, which “includes everything Evernote has to offer with a number of powerful new features designed exclusively to meet the needs of our business users,” says the company. Evernote is already a popular platform for corporate use, but it’s traditionally worked in a much more personal sense. This means Evernote will start competing with the likes of Yammer, Asana, and Do from Salesforce – although it’s a paid service, not a free one with premium features, and will cost $10 a month.

Among the new tools are features like an admin console, a billing system, and easy on-boarding for current users. Interested in beta testing? You can sign up here, otherwise you’ll have to wait until December when it’s formally launched.

Smart Notebook

Also announced at the Truck Conference was the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine. Evernote’s job is to eliminate the need for last-gen note-taking (e.g. with paper and and writing utensil), but the collaboration between old and new could easily be a popular one for the almost-converts who just can’t put down the pen.

“We’ve partnered with Moleskine to develop a new, limited edition Evernote Smart Notebook that’s designed specifically for the new Evernote iOS application,” says Evernote. “Together, we created a gorgeous notebook that includes a number of special features that allow you to take your ideas off the written page and place them right into Evernote, where they’ll be searchable, organized and available forever.”

The two have come together to design a special type of page that the new Evernote iPhone app can very clearly read. It creates a high contrast visual so the image you’ll have in the app is far more life-like than other pictures of text you take, and it’s supposed to be able to accurately recognize handwriting as well.

It also comes with Smart Stickers, which the app will read for auto-labeling your written entries.

The Smart Notebook is definitely a bit of a novelty item, but at $30, it’s an interesting and affordable one – and there are plenty users (ahem… this one right here) who can’t give up the physical act of list-making just yet.